Thus, during the elderly period, the accumulated health risk factors over all life periods make a substantial impact on health.
Does the difference in health among groups of people with different SES expand or shrink during the elderly stage?
In the meantime, we address whether health differences among people with different SES expand or shrink during the elderly stages.
After incubating for a long period, some diseases that are dormant at a younger age will be present during the elderly period.
In Fig. 1, we see that the self-rated health differences between the lowest- and the medium-SES groups gradually decrease with increasing age; their self-rated health reports are fairly close especially during the elderly period.
To summarize, no consensus has been reached on the relationship between SES and health during the elderly stage, and the most current conclusions are based on the empirical evidence from developed countries, which demonstrates the need for ongoing research on this problem in a different socioeconomic setting such as China.
The reason that health differences gradually become smaller during the elderly stage may be that in the elderly stage, the differences in psychological and social risk factors (such as a lack of social relations and social support or the deprivation of the feeling of being in control) faced by people with different SES gradually reduced or even disappeared (House et al. 1994; Lantz et al. 1998).
I will continue to emphasize orthostatic hypotension, since during sleep, the elderly – either under medication treatment, or not – frequently get out of bed during the night to urinate, which is associated with the usual drop in blood pressure during sleep.
Heart attacks and rhythm disturbances have killed athletes during play and elderly people engaged in strenuous tasks like shoveling snow.
In previous posts I have pointed out that national employment per capita actually increased among the elderly during the recession.
